17ce deforestation

Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan: climate change, deforestation, and moral regeneration

JAMES McMULLEN

The article sketches the views on ecology of the seventeenth-century Japanese Confucian scholar Kumazawa Banzan, concentrating on his thinking on forestry and climate change. At the same time his views suggest resonances with our twenty-first century discourse around ecology and moral leadership. Banzan applied Chinese cyclical cosmology and thought on the relation of man to nature to diagnose an ecological crisis in the exploitation of nature in his own world. He diagnosed the threat of imminent climate change and, with that, social and political upheaval. His views on political morality and material con sumption were underpinned by a Neo-Confucian emphasis on the primacy of agriculture and concept of man’s position that recognized the ontological inter dependence of man and nature. Human activity, particularly that of the ruler, impinged on the natural order. Towards the end of his life, he felt impelled to remonstrate against the misgovernment of the Tokugawa regime. He made rad ical proposals for the restoration of a materially frugal but culturally rich and politically devolved physiocratic socio-political order. Complementing his pro posals for institutional reform was a concern with individual self-cultivation that stressed man’s ontological position in the natural order and the need for moral regeneration at individual and social levels. The text was subsequently pub lished in Japanese translation (McMullen 2011). I am grateful to Professor Komuro Masamichi and Professor Ikeda Yoshihiro, his colleague in the Faculty of Economics and coordinator of the lecture series, for kind permission to pub lish this revised version. Many themes merely sketched here are discussed in greater detail in my Banzan biography (McMullen 1999).

Japan Forum, 2020

Vol. 0, No. 0, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2020.1806902

Copyright # 2020 BAJS

2 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century JapanKumazawa Banzan

“There was once a saying that the land of Japan is moving to the south” (2: 271).1 This startling suggestion was put by an interlocutor to the Japanese Confucian thinker and teacher Kumazawa Banzan in the mid-to-late seven teenth century (1619–1691). Banzan dismissed the idea but made it a point of departure for the analysis of an ecological crisis that he believed threat ened Japan.

This article sketches Banzan’s critique of the contemporary Japanese govern ment, his warning of impending ecological peril, his proposals for the regener ation of his country, together with the Neo-Confucian view of moral agency informing his proposals. It illustrates Banzan’s appeal to Chinese and Japanese history and to empirical observation to press for reform of his present. Much of his discussion resonates with the ecological challenges facing the twenty first-century world. As Ian Miller has noted, environmental themes help us rethink even the grandest historical events (Miller 2013, 1). Banzan’s analysis addresses such topical ecological concerns as deforestation, flooding, and cli mate warming. It extends also to the egotism of politicians, hereditary privil ege, population increase, policy formulation, distribution of wealth, economic and cultural cycles, debt, waste, travel, and extractive industries.

The world about which Banzan wrote falls in the “early Tokugawa period,” the first phase of the two-and-a half-century Tokugawa regime. By the 1670s, following several centuries of civil war, peace and stability had been established for several decades. Structures of authority were consolidated as the descend ants of warlords established autocratic control in some 250 baronies. Heavy taxation was imposed on the peasantry to support a military estate that consti tuted some 5–10% of the population. This was a period of rapid expansion of agricultural productivity and of the economy, population and urbanization. Over the seventeenth century, Japan’s population increased by around 1% a year. Large cities developed, including three with a population in excess of 300,000. Urbanization greatly increased demand for timber, not least for Buddhist temples, constructed partly in response to the shogunate’s anti Christian inquisition. The natural forest cover of hills came under pressure. The American historian Conrad Totman refers to this period as the “early modern predation [of Japan’s forest resources]” (Totman 1989, 50).

Banzan viewed these developments with alarm. An unusually varied life enabled him to see his country’s problems in the context both of the whole society and its various sub-cultures. His family origins were in the rural sam urai gentry of the countryside near Kyoto. Several years of his youth spent wandering in the countryside familiarized him with the realities of rural life (2: 35) and help account for his life-long sympathy with the peasantry. In early manhood, he served Ikeda Mitsumasa (1609–1682), daimyo of Okayama, one of the most conscientious rulers of the period, for whom he acted as a

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commissar of relief during a flood disaster in 1654. He also experienced urban life in the military capital at Edo. But he resigned from feudal service in his late thirties and devoted the rest of his life to study and teaching. During his forties he lived for several years in Kyoto where he studied Japan’s greatest cul tural monument, the Tale of Genji. Unusually for a Confucian, he became a champion of the Genji. For a few months in 1669 he stayed in Yoshino, one of the most densely forested areas of the country. He subsequently lived in semi exile until his incarceration 4 years before his death in 1691.

Banzan encountered Confucianism through a brief period of study with Nakae Toju (1608–1648), a follower of the idealist Wang Yangming (1473–1529) or School of Mind (Japanese Shingaku) tradition within Neo Confucianism. Toju’s teaching stressed the inward moral state of mind of the believer rather than conformity with objective rituals. Banzan’s mature thought shared this concern with subjectivity. His voluminous discursive writings and commentaries address the practical meaning of Confucianism for Japanese under the late feudal settlement. Independently from Toju he also drew on the universalist and humanist tradition within Confucianism and a strong sense of history. A pervasive influence was the “soaring and defiant idealism” (Schwartz 1985, 286) of Mencius (371–289 BCE), who believed in an innate human pre disposition to good, posited humaneness (Chinese: ren) as the principal virtue and privileged the common people as beneficiaries of government. Banzan also developed a sense of the historical distinctiveness of the Japanese experience which, however, did not vitiate his universalism. His response to the crisis of his country, though radically Confucian and idealistic, also favored relativism and gradualism. He believed, for instance, that adoption of objective Confucian institutions should be subject to the threefold conditions of “time, place and rank.”

History and sophistication

Banzan’s view of history was Sinocentric and universal (or, in modern terms, global). Japanese history was a local variant on universal patterns of societal and political development. He accepted the Confucian belief in Heaven (Chinese Tian) as a superordinate but inscrutable presence associated with nebulous “Spiritual Intelligences” (Shenming), the spirit agents of Heaven itself. These forces controlled cosmic events through seasonal creativity, and by admonitory interventions and on occasion retribution for human wrongdoing (Schwartz 1985, 369–372). The accepted pattern of human history among Confucians was of cycles, generally progressing to decline followed by renewal. The Han Dynasty (206–220 CE) scholar Dong Zhongshu (177–104 BCE) wrote influentially of a cyclical alternation or oscillation between “simplicity” (zhi) and “refinement” (wen; Schwartz 1985, 379). Such texts as the “Great

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Plan” in the canonical Book of Documents (Shu jing; Legge 1960, vol. 3, 340), and the “Han Shu Gazeteer of the Five Elements” (Kanjo Wu xingzhi; Yoshikawa and Tomita 1986) by Ban Gu (32–92) developed an influential system of cor respondences between human moral action and the natural order. In this sys tem “humaneness” was linked to “origination” (yuan), the principle of birth and growth in the natural world (Goto and Tomoeda 1973, 571–573). Inhumane conduct, particularly by a ruler, created disturbance in the natural order and climate. Confucians also addressed the duration of cycles and oscil lations. The Shiji (Records of the Historian) of Sima Qian (145–86 BCE) posited a minor change every thirty and major change every 500 years (Qian 1959, vol. 4, 1344). Later, during the Neo-Confucian revival of the Song dynasty (960–1279), a schematic cyclical theory was developed by the numerologist and cosmologist Shao Yong (1011–1077) who posited cosmic cycles of 129,600 years, divided into sub-cycles (Chan 1963, 487).

Banzan’s achievement was to synthesize these constructions into a coherent narrative of East Asian history within which Japan was a local and national instantiation. Like the Han dynasty thinkers, he saw Heaven as a superordinate, but ultimately benevolent, power controlling the cosmos. He found evidence of cycles of “flourishing and decline” in the natural and human worlds “even among inanimate entities” (2: 282; 1: 234). This pattern unfolded in successive stages of world history in the form of “Heaven’s cycles” (Ten’un; 4: 117). These were characterized by progression from shisso, a positive “simplicity” or moral “purity,” to bunmei, a binom composed from kanji meaning literally “pattern” or “refinement” plus “bright” or “illumined.” Bunmei is usually translated posi tively as “civilization.” But for Banzan, bunmei also had a negative nuance better conveyed by the English usage of “sophistication.” Banzan associated this nega tive sense with cyclical loss of pure simplicity due to specious refinement and technical virtuosity; the proliferation of goods and private wealth; and the moral corruption of “desire” (yoku) and extravagance (ky osha).

In Banzan’s words, when “the cycle of sophistication (bunmei no un) reached an extreme” (1: 122) the balance that characterized social life was lost. In due course, through the mutual influence of moral and natural principles, this resulted in climate warming. Banzan explained that the underlying causes of this phenomenon were moral and economic. As the Confucian way declined and sophistication and production of goods increased, the moral “rules and bonds” (kik o) of society were “loosened,” and people became willful. The effect was a cyclical “blockage” of both material force (ki: the physical constituent of the cos mos) and of men” (4: 307). This obstruction was caused by “soft evil” (juaku ) in the form of such failings as laxity, selfishness, extravagance, impatience, enrichment of merchants, impoverishment of gentlemen, empty domain treas uries, and doubling of taxation of the people. In turn, these abuses were associ ated with climate warming through heating of “material force” (2: 271).

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Drawing on the Han dynasty belief that human activity impacted upon the insect world, Banzan believed the resulting “northward moving” of this “material force” brought forth new species of noxious insect such as “rice borers and hornworms” that survived winters (3: 140; Yoshikawa and Tomita 1986, 164).

Soft evil had “by degrees” (kuraizume ni; 2: 271) led the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) to its end (2: 272). The violence of what Banzan called the “hard villainy” (g oaku) of the tyrannical Qin (221–207 BCE) that replaced the Zhou “rapidly” cooled the climate. Under the Qin, production and consump tion of goods fell, and the population, another acute Banzan concern, declined to a salutary level. But warfare, too, could not continue indefinitely. “When upheaval reaches its limit, it becomes order.” In terms of an often-used analog linking cyclical history to the four seasons, this represented a return to spring and the birth of men with “talent and ability (2: 272).” The realm was now re unified under Han Gaozu (r. 202–195 BCE) for whom Banzan had a special admiration (3: 102–103). Banzan lamented however, that from the end of the Han dynasty, “for more than two millennia” with a brief interlude for the Song Neo-Confucian revival, “blockage” (4: 307), decline, and over-production had again impacted on the climate and “in later ages … the material force of the four seasons has been disordered” (2: 284).

Banzan, however, was not a determinist; human agency played an important part in history. Irregularities and decline were influenced by human moral activ ity; “the southward and northward movement [of material force] varies within a century. This was not due to the cycle of Heaven and Earth, but to responses to the material force of men” (3: 140–141). Intervention by rulers, particularly if qualified morally and through their understanding of nature, could arrest or reverse cyclical decline. Banzan endorsed the claim of the Doctrine of the Mean that the Sage, through the cosmic impact of his moral perfection, can “assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth” (Legge 1960, vol. 1, 416). However, he made an important extension of this claim that clearly addressed his own unenlightened time: this “assistance” could be achieved by lesser men of morally informed talent who “even if they do not possess the vir tue of worthy or superior man,” were “unashamed of questioning inferiors and by using the knowledge available in the land” (2: 274–275).

“Sophistication,” consumption, and deforestation in Japan

Turning to recent Japanese history, Banzan sited both China and Japan in a phase of “cyclical sophistication” (1: 152–153). In Japan, new species of nox ious insects, associated with warming, “have come into existence in the last 50 or 60 years” (3: 135): “since Lord [Toyotomi] Hideyoshi (1537–1598) initiated extravagance in the realm … a serious deterioration” takes place, “as though

6 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

the style of the realm has crumbled.” (2: 44). Consumption and extravagance had soared. Banzan noted a threefold increase in salt fields (for salting and pre serving food), with a resulting depletion of bird and fish populations; twenty fold growth in pottery (2: 6–7) and a hundred-fold in sake shops and southern barbarian cakes (3: 241). Production of fashionable new gift food stands and wooden boxes for gifts was now “vast” (2: 239). The cycle also dramatically affected human fertility. The population of Japan itself had increased a rhet orical “hundredfold” in “recent times.” Banzan noted that: “Since Heaven and Earth parted, never have there been as many people or land as cramped as in recent times” (2: 182).

Banzan saw further features of his world as stimulating consumption: the rise of merchants, increased use of metal currency, development of an exchange market in rice and abandonment of grain as the staple currency. He believed that metal currency had a legitimate supplementary use. Money had been invented in Chinese antiquity at a time of grain shortage to facilitate exchange (1: 422). But its use had limitations. Banzan noted that “in years of famine, gold and silver do not become food. Many have died clutching them and starving” (2: 191). He also noted that at times when precious metals, jade, and pearls were highly valued, not only did the production of grains fall but it also brought with it the evil of inflation (1: 153). It also brought environmental distress. Mining gold, silver, copper and iron for export to pay for imported fine Chinese fabrics, he suggested, was a cause of deforesting mountains and silting up of rivers (2: 84). It was remarked of Banzan in the eighteenth century that he was “wholly averse to digging up anything from the earth” (Yuasa 1927, 695).

Banzan’s ecological diagnosis identified forests as pivotal. “Mountain for ests” were the “basis of the state” (2: 7). On their flourishing or depletion depended the fate of the country. He noted that, in high Chinese antiquity, “famous mountains, river and marshes” were not granted in fief “so as not to allow their willful deforestation” (4: 118; Legge, 1967, vol. 1, 246). But for estry was a field in which Banzan often adduced empirical observation. There were two immediate reasons for the importance of forests. The first was meteorological. He classified rain into two main types: “transformational rains” (kika no ame) and summer showers (yudachi ). To the former belong regular, seasonal “spring rains” (harusame) and the monsoon of the fifth lunar month (samidare). These were the product of the “ascent of the material force of Heaven and descent of that of Earth” (2: 124). Transformational rains ceased after the fifth month. Thereafter, in the heat of summer, vegetation depended on summer showers essential for the harvest of both wet and dry crops. Here forests were vital. Banzan accepted the Chinese belief that “mountains, forests, streams, valleys, hills, and mounds and hills” produced “clouds and occasion wind and rain” (Legge 1967, vol. 2, 203; see also Legge 1963, 424). He found

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empirical support in a meteorological phenomenon of the hinterland of the Kii peninsula. There a “spirit material force,” a mere league square, persisted even when other parts of the peninsula were cloudless (2: 61). This rose spontan eously from the forests and increased the flow of the rivers draining the area. Once deforested, mountains lost their capacity to emit this vapour. Banzan attributed the poor harvests of recent decades along the Bizen and Harima lit toral to the deforestation of Awajishima and Shodojima isles in the Inland Sea (2: 124–125).

The second reason for the fundamental importance of forests was geological: the capacity of forests to retain water and prevent erosion, silting of river beds, and flooding.

A mountain luxuriantly covered with trees and plants does not drop earth and sand into the rivers. Even in the event of heavy rain, the water is contained in the vegetation. Because it passes into the rivers naturally, over a period of ten to twelve days, in no case is there flood disaster, but when there is no vegetation on the mountains, earth and sand enter the rivers and the height of the river beds is raised. (2: 7)

Banzan’s theory of deforestation represents an application of his cyclical the ory of history. Surveying the recent Japanese past, he noted repetitive cycles of decline and renewal involving the condition of the forests. Peace would be established, but extravagance and timber consumption would rise. Deforestation would ensue, plunging the country into upheaval. Forests and rivers would recover, since everyone would be too busy fighting to fell timber for Buddhist temples or other purposes. This cycle had been experienced at the end of the Heian period (794–1185), when deforestation had precipitated the Hogen (1156) and Heiji (1159) insurrections and the Genpei wars (1180–1185). During these decades, the forests had recovered. Their depletion during the peaceful Kamakura period (1185–1333) resulted in the Kenmu upheaval (1333–1336). Recovery followed, only to be nullified by the extrava gance of the Ashikaga period (1336–1568). During the ensuing warfare, which had lasted until re-unification under Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), the forests had again recovered. Since then, however, the mountain forests had again become “mown bare” (2: 236–237).

The main culprit in this contemporary crisis, Banzan believed, was Buddhism. Buddhists were responsible for seven-tenths of extravagance. Buddhism used a foreign, unsuitable architecture. The grandiose architectural style used by contemporary Buddhists had developed in India and China, countries “fifty or a hundred times” larger than Japan, with “infinite” forestry resources. If the Buddha, “being an intelligent man,” were to come to Japan, he would make a “lonely grass hermitage” his dwelling, rather than erect vast numbers of towers and halls (2: 48–49). But there were other significant causes of excessive timber consumption. Military houses had “no excuse for the vast

8 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

numbers of towers, barracks, donjons, and residences in the castles of today” (2: 239). There was also the detrimental environmental impact brought about by the commercialization of agricultural production. Banzan observed that: “In recent years many people, both men and women … have become fond of boiled tea (senjicha) and tea plantations have increased a hundred-fold in all provinces. As a consequence, exhaustion of firewood is limitless” (3: 259).

Lessons from the Japanese past: The Tale of Genji

Banzan’s ideal society and healthy ecology and climate were not found only in the China of high antiquity. He also idealized the more recent Japanese past. His enthusiasm for the Tale of Genji led him to write a commentary, his Genji gaiden (Discursive commentary on the Genji) primarily for women readers. He viewed the novel as holding important political and cultural lessons for his own age. “If this novel did not exist,” he asked, “how could we admire and know the style bequeathed from past ages?” (2: 422–423). The Genji had been writ ten towards the end of the era in Japanese history called “the royal age” ( odai). This period overlapped with the ancient age of China and was thus “still close to the old style of purity” (2: 476). However, the age was beginning to unravel; signs of decline appeared in the dissolute sexual conduct of many characters, the indifference of emperors to practical governance, the undesirable rise of oli garchy, and failures in education.

In respect of consumption and ecology, however, the age of Genji remained an exemplary world. It preserved the balance between material sufficiency and cultural activities including music and dance. Banzan admired the court rituals vividly described in the “Beneath the Autumn Leaves” and “Under the Cherry Blossoms” chapters, and the way social activity was coordinated in the novel. Many of these historical usages, such as those for mourning, Banzan believed, though ultimately of Chinese origin, had been adjusted for the different dispos ition of the Japanese and might be revived in modified form (1: 263).

Banzan believed that correct ritual (rei) prevented waste and conspicuous consumption. He explained how frugality at the apex of society determined other positive features of the past, particularly its low fiscal burden on the peas antry of only one-tenth of production (2: 464). He linked the observance of “ritual and protocols” in Genji’s day with the absence of a separate estate of military men such as characterized the society of his own time. The growth of extravagance following the end of the “royal age” had precipitated the transi tion to military rule and the instability and suffering of subsequent Japanese history (2: 464). Underlying the superiority of ancient society was the undam aged forest cover of the land. That “the mountains were luxuriant and the riv ers deep” recurs like a refrain through his Genji commentary.

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The “restoration of Japan”; assisting the creative processes of heaven and earth

In 1680, the autocratic, authoritarian, and capricious Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (r. 1680–1709), succeeded as fifth shogun, determined to make the people vir tuous if necessary by coercion (Tsuji 1991, 437). In 1685 Banzan wrote to Ikeda Tsunamasa (1638–1714), successor to his former patron Ikeda Mitsumasa, accusing the shogun of being “inhumane,” and cautioning him against emulating “evils such as may even cost [the shogun] the realm” (6: 166). Convention, however, condemned policy proposals from the unranked. “Even if I knew, I should not say” (1: 153). Banzan seems to have hesitated.

Within a year or so, however, his perception of mounting external and internal threats to Japan spurred Banzan to overcome his inhibitions and to compile the 22-item memorial now known as Daigaku wakumon (Questions on the Great Learning). Externally, he was prompted by fear: that following their four decades earlier conquest of China the Manchus would invade Japan. An internal threat to the feudal state came from an economic order evolving from a localized rural exchange system towards a nationwide economy based on merchant capital and specie. One proposal was for the immediate capping of the exchange price of rice (3: 280) to protect Banzan’s “great project of wealth” (fuyu no daigy o) to eliminate debt, insolvency, and vagrancy.

The memorial initially circulated privately among his disciples. A prefatory note identifies its purpose as a “living method to save the present.” (3: 233). The threat of invasion and need for currency reform recur in the text. They do so, however, in part at least, to bolster a longer-term and higher purpose: to press the urgent need for reform of a Japan that Banzan diagnosed as “internally hollow and with its people’s hearts mutually alienated” (3: 248). As elsewhere with Banzan’s ecology polemics, there is here a resonance with our twentieth-century counterpart. This resonance is structural; it occurs between their featuring of external threats. Neither Banzan’s reaction to the threat of Manchu invasion nor the nationalistic response to the Covid19 pandemic dra matically impacts on ecology itself, but both compound the dangers and help galvanize warnings against ecological catastrophe. Banzan’s memorial is best read primarily as a courageous and comprehensive critique of the moral leader ship of the contemporary regime. It suggested proposals for rationalizing its more wasteful institutions, radical redistribution of wealth according to Mencian priorities of humane government, and, above all, mitigation of the ecological damage inflicted by misrule. In the language of Banzan’s Confucian rhetoric, his proposals were intended to replace “causing consternation to Heaven, Earth and the Spirit Intelligences by obstructing their creative proc esses” with following “the [selfless Sages’] way of man” to “assist” these proc esses (3: 270).10 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

Banzan began his critique with a disquisition on the Heavenly office of the “Lord of Men,” clearly with Tsunayoshi himself in mind. As the recipient of the “Decree of Heaven,” the shogun occupied the nexus between Heaven and the human word; he must exercise parental, exemplary authority publicly and transparently to retain the “goodwill” of the masses (shu ) (3: 235). Banzan criticized the rulership of Japan over the half millennium since the ascendancy of the “military houses.” The Minamoto, Hoj o and Ashikaga had all been “hegemons” (3: 260), men whose rule hypocritically promoted humaneness, but “inwardly had something morbid about it” (3: 288). Tsunayoshi himself was no less afflicted. His authoritarian misrule “as though ordering his offi cers” jeopardized his regime (3: 235). A serious fault was restricting appoint ment to the hereditarily privileged, rather than from a wider pool including men from “among the people and the lowly born” or from the “wilds” outside officialdom (3: 235). This failing was accompanied by the costly grant of her editary fiefs, rather than single-generational incomes, to officials appointed to high office (3: 236). Daigaku wakumon provocatively lists six “sicknesses of mind” (shinby o) among the shogun and daimyo (3: 270–272). The first three directly related to the style of rulership; self-righteousness, egotism, (also called “prioritizing the ruler’s own brilliant knowledge” [meichi; 3: 236] or “cleverness” [meisatsu; 3: 237]), and disregard of Confucius’ injunction to be “unashamed of questioning inferiors” (Legge 1960, 178). Added also was doc trinaire adherence to one or other of the three traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Shinto. The damage caused by these failings resulted in wide spread suffering, resentment, damage to the creative process of Heaven and Earth, and illness. In extreme cases, blockage of “the passage of words [of advice from inferiors]” (genro; Morohashi 1955, 35205/126), attracted “disaster and upheaval” (3: 270).

Two other “sicknesses of mind,” affecting attitudes to law and to wealth, were demonstrated in Tokugawa rule. Banzan accused Tsunayoshi of a predi lection for autocratic “rewards and punishments,” enforcement of which “damages the spirit of life of Heaven and Earth” (3: 270). Here, Banzan reflected the Confucian insistence on exemplary virtue, particularly “humaneness,” as the proper mode of exercising authority. He cited Chinese history to confirm this: the first Qin emperor’s tyranny had destroyed his regime but had been corrected by the first Han emperor Gaozu’s receptivity to good advice and remonstrations. Banzan extended his praise to Xiao Wu (r. 141–87 BCE), the fifth Han emperor. He borrowed Mencius’ encomium of wise rulers of “talents and virtue,” as “gravely complaisant and economical” (3: 237; Legge 1960, 2: 240). This was surely a hint that Tsunayoshi, also the fifth sovereign of a national ruling lineage, to make his rule comparable to the exemplary Han (3: 237).

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Education, rites, and music

Daigaku wakumon advocates the Confucian and ecologically beneficent modes of education, ritual and music. Education should be under the patronage of the ruler. References in the memorial suggest that Banzan envisaged a hier archy of educational institutions ranging from a central imperial court school as in China and ancient Japan, provincial samurai schools in the feudal domains, to “rural junior schools” (sh ogaku). A major function of schools was to stage improving lectures to the “shogun, his senior ministers and to the feudal lords.” The head of the school should be a practitioner of the Neo Confucian pursuit of introspective and moral self-cultivation and should influ ence the ruler to be similarly morally responsible (3: 273).

Banzan drew up detailed educational provision for the “sons of warriors.” (3: 272–274). Schooling should encourage a spontaneous appetite for learning. Rituals and music were important, for “ritual respect” had cosmic influence. Banzan explained elsewhere that “when … rites and music are practised, it matches the receptive virtue of Heaven and assists the living material force of creation; Heaven, Earth and man are in harmony” (3: 136). His vision was of a choreographed society as depicted in the Genji. He advocated that instruction in dignified behavior begin from age 8 to 9 with familial rituals and extended later to relations with authority. Teaching literacy should also begin early, because “although a child of 8 or 9 does not read, there is benefit of a voice at his side reading.” Independent reading should begin “from around twenty” with “inserting markers at places that they do not understand to ask about them.” The handling of weaponry was taught from 14 or15; military skills, along with the hunt, should be taught by expert teachers.

Music was essential to the curriculum. Banzan endorsed the Confucian canonical claim that music directly influenced climate. “The phenomenon of rain falling in a drought, or of fine weather occuring during a monsoon is because the five notes, correlating with the five elements, assist Heaven and Earth and the Spirit Intelligences” (2: 251). Banzan recommended that “children of 8 or 9, or 11 to 12, should be made to chant the notes of the flute, hichiriki, or sh o. Under a teacher competent in pitch and rhythm, they should learn in classes of 10 or 20 at a time. From 12 or 13 they should learn wind instruments. Stringed instruments should be taught from the s o.” He also sug gested that imperial court traditions including music be exported to the provin ces. Able sons of emperors and high court officials should inherit rank and office within the court, but others should be sent to the provinces with women folk, to instruct in cultural skills, especially music. Their descendants should be absorbed into rural society (3: 277–278).

This schooling would meet the administrative and military needs of domains and the realm, and in the process, bring about the “restoration of Japan.”

12 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

Within 50 years Japan would merit the ancient accolade conferred in China of “land of superior men” (Kunshikoku; 3: 274).

“Protocols”

Confucian-style schools, rites, and music were to replace law and punishments, but these measures did not directly address the issue of consumption. To that end, Banzan advocated the closely related institution of “protocols” (shiki). This Chinese legal concept referred to shi, the most flexible category of Chinese law, which entailed the regular updating of the “provisions covering enforcement of the criminal Code (Chinese Lu€) and the administrative Statutes (Ling)” (Twitchett 1979, 18). For Banzan, “protocols” were central to his “restoration.” They were the vehicle for reduction of consumption and waste and the solution to the “distress and want” among the populace (3: 64). “Protocols” had metaphysical status; Banzan believed that “creation” was an “inexhaustible store house” (mujinz o) but required human agency for its “consummation” (k o). To this end, the Sages of antiquity had created “rites and music” and made “protocols” through “systemization” of rituals. In the absence of Sages, the formulation of “protocols” was not beyond men of talent (2: 275). Trying to curtail extravagance without the appropriate “protocols,” he noted, was similar “to damming up an ocean with one’s hand” (1: 153). For Banzan, the sanction of “protocols” was gentler than that of law. He explained

When protocols are detailed, the world becomes peaceful … . Punishment exists for those who offend against laws, but none [befall] transgressions against protocols. Contravention is merely regarded as occasioning shame. When shame accumulates, it is impossible to appear before other men. Therefore, even though unpunished, [abuses] die out. (3: 274–275)

A distinctive aspect of “protocols” was that they were formulated by a trans parent consultative process. Banzan advocated for a draft of “several tens of items” be compiled under the direction of a “man of warrior background who is familiar with the Way” and other erudite men. After discussion by the sam urai community and revision under the domain lord, fair copies should be cir culated to the domains and “the advice of men of wisdom and talent obtained, and further adjustments made” (3: 274).

At the social level, Banzan suggested that protocols concerning courtesy calls and gift exchange should be modest and undemanding on the less well off or old. For dress, colour rather than cost of fabric should distinguish status. Some de-militarization should take place: the court dress should be adopted for those in rank-bearing office and sword wearing reduced to wakizashi under normal circumstances (3: 276). Banzan identified the contemporary “alternate

James McMullen 13

attendance” (sankin k otai) of daimyo in Edo as originally a “protocol” of the warrior Kamakura regime worth revival in his own time (3: 252). In Banzan’s day, this system required daimyo to make costly alternate year travel to and from the military capital, where they maintained residences; it was “the foun dation upon which the whole Tokugawa power system was based” (Tsukahira 1966, 137). Banzan proposed to return to the more modest and carefully paced Kamakura period version of attendance of a mere fifty days once every 3 years. Such a relaxation would be “the great basis of humane administration” (3: 252). With the acquiescence of the daimyo, their wives and families would leave the military capital of Edo to live more cheaply in the provinces. Startingly, the city itself would be reduced to one tenth of its present size (3: 262). Symbolically, perhaps even mischievously, Banzan suggested that the Mencian “well-field” system of paddy distribution, yielding a tithe, might be used on the flat ground cleared of now superfluous daimyo Edo mansions (3: 262; Legge 1960, 2: 241, 245). Furthermore, the entire provincial samurai estate would be resettled in the countryside as cultivators integrated into rural communities, resulting in improvements to their all-round health (3: 260–263). Most striking of all, the current high “taxation rate unheard in the past which causes extreme suffering of the people” (3: 240) could, over two or three generations, be reduced to the Confucian canonical tithe of the annual product (3: 262–263).2

Protection of the forests

In Banzan’s view, good government necessarily protected rather than plun dered nature’s bounty, especially the forests. His “restoration of Japan” was informed by his belief that deforestation threatened civil war. Deforestation brought threat, intensified in the event of invasion, from the “strong men” of Yoshino, Kumano and other mountainous places who lived off lumbering. “Since at that time there would not be anyone to exchange timber for rice, they would all become brigands, and have no alternative but to emerge into the provinces” (3: 248).

Longer term, Banzan’s measures were premised on his “great project of wealth.” “Five or six years after the inauguration of humane government, since the debt of the realm would be extinguished, it would be easy to use the sur plus rice to legislate for hills and rivers.” The impact of his proposals varied according to stratum of society. One aim was reducing the labour force engaged in timber production. Felling in Yoshino, Kumano, Kiso and other mountainous ranges should be terminated, and the unemployed lumbermen given allowances (3: 254). In such domains where timber defrayed domain expenses, wider reforms would reduce public and private costs by nine-tenths.

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Dependence on forestry for income might be offset by converting taxes on mountains to other levies (3: 256).

Timber required for religious building, Shinto or Buddhist, remained a major cause of deforestation. The recent Shinto practice of building subsidiary shrines to worship a single deity diminished the authority of the god. Subsidiary shrines for deities at Ise, Usa, Nara, and Izumo should be demol ished and the timber used for repairs of the main shrine. This procedure would have the additional benefit of consolidating worship to one “amalgamated tutelary shrine” (yosemiya) per province (3: 257).

Buddhism, Banzan believed, was massively responsible for the danger posed by deforestation. He suggested that the application of an “ordination law” would reduce Buddhist orders to “one in a thousand” (3: 267). For Banzan, the shogunate’s reliance on Buddhist clergy to implement its anti-Christian inquisition, served “no use at all” except to enhance the prosperity of Buddhism and should be abolished (3: 265). Yet despite his vigorous critique of Buddhist practices and Shinto beliefs, Banzan did not favour a repressive orthodoxy. He was willing to accommodate religious diversity ecumenically in a tolerant non-sectarian “Spirit way of Heaven and Earth,” an ideal order in which “honorable and base, men and women, Buddhists and Confucians alike would all be supported by humane government” (4: 184).

The Bakufu and warrior estate would be included in retrenchment. It wasted timber on unnecessary projects. Officially sponsored rebuilding of whole shrines and temples was undertaken with “poor quality timber, and under car penters’ billing, and with rough joinery.” Rather than complete rebuilding, shrines and temples should be preserved by piecemeal repairs which would last 3–5 times longer. In the provinces, castles would be reduced to donjons and first enceintes; reintegration of the samurai into rural communities would reduce samurai residences to one-tenth, most of the sites becoming arable (3: 258).

Reduced timber consumption should extend to the rural population. “Peasant dwellings do not require much timber; their needs can mostly be satis fied from trees round the villages” (3: 258). But rural communities adjacent to forested mountains depleted forestry resources because villagers gathered grass and firewood there. Dependence on mountains should be eliminated by burning straw from arable crops. Villagers should be given rice allowances to forestall them gathering fuel from the hills to sell. In densely populated areas, from com munities of 50 families, groups of 20 should be resettled elsewhere. “Kyush u is spacious land and thinly populated … The land is fertile, so the annual tax is easy.” Houses should be built in advance; generous allowances allocated until the arrivals settled down. In general, with widespread prosperity, the present illegal fuel gathering to which impoverished populations were driven “despite the threat of decapitation on the morrow,” would cease (3: 254–256).

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Banzan also advocated widespread re-forestation. The deforested mountain ous terrain of Yoshino, Kongo-sen and other places should be reseeded from seeds reported as abundant in the east and north of Japan. Authorities should commission experts in silviculture and before long the hills would become lux uriant. “With ubiquitously replenished forest cover, in summer showers should be frequent … . In stream after stream, earth and sand would pass to the sea without silting, so that the distress of flooding would be eliminated” (3: 256).

Banzan proposed a practical method of afforestation to secure “a permanent abundance of firewood.” It involved attracting birds to bare mountains by spreading hie (Japanese millet) on the surface. The birds would deposit the seeds [of trees that they had eaten] in their droppings.

Spreading hie and hay [on the deforested surface], is to make it difficult to pick at, so that the birds stay for a long time. Moreover, [the seeds of the trees] are not washed away by rain and encouraged to germinate in the mountain soil. In this way, in about thirty years a thick growth of miscellaneous trees is produced. (3: 255)

Pine woods, however, required special treatment because “pine mountains” did not “produce showers and rain.” Banzan advocated the felling of pine. “Rain and dew settling on pines is poisonous so there is no tree and plant undergrowth and the water is bad for paddy and dry fields. Young pines should be pulled up and discarded … . Present pine mountains should naturally become miscellaneous tree clad hills” (3: 255–256).

Self-cultivation and ecological regeneration

What response did Banzan expect of the population from this radical “new normal”? The cultivation of an interior moral life is essential to Banzan’s holis tic approach to the “restoration” of Japan and he addressed the impact of his objective reforms from this perspective. Moreover, he was well known in his lifetime as a teacher of the Neo-Confucian system of mental and spiritual dis cipline through “psychological techniques.” At the elite level, this led to Sagehood, a state that qualified the individual to exercise authority. His pro posal for education, as noted above, included appointment of a head teacher who could guide his ruler on this path together with the study of Confucian canonical texts for samurai pupils. His wider view of the polity suggests com plementarity between his objective reforms and the moral regeneration of the populace at the individual level.

Banzan’s account of individual subjectivity was basically optimistic and Mencian, yet, like his “restoration” of objective institutions, it also compromised with the social hierarchies of late feudal Japan. At the same time, his Neo Confucian thinking was also influenced by Daoist ideas on freedom from the impediments of institutions, hierarchies, and material wealth. Resonances with

16 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

Laozi’s Daode jing (The Book of the Way) can be seen, for instance, in his reiter ated call for restoration of the pristine natural “Great Way” and his claim that in the primal stage of human history such terms as “filial” and “loyal” did not exist, since there was no transgression of these values (1: 148; Legge 1962, 1: 61). His ideal “free and easy roaming” (2: 52) and the designation of ritual as “the dregs” (2: 172) of the Sages echo the Daoist text Zhuangzi (Watson 1966, 29, 235).

Drawing on Confucian historicism, Banzan argued that in the beginning, humankind was endowed by Heaven with “Heavenly natures” (Tensei) that pre disposed them spontaneously to act in accordance with the transcendent Great Way of the cosmic “five norms” and “ten moral values” (1: 138), definitive val ues whereby “a person is basically a person”(6: 26).3 Since these values func tioned in reciprocal influence with the natural order, so long as men conformed with them, the climate remained regular. In the earliest time, mankind lived mainly as hunter gatherers with no differentiation of status (1: 167). However, “several tens of thousands of years” after “the parting of Heaven and Earth,” the prelapsarian egalitarian universally endowed Heavenly natures of men suf fered occlusion, though not destruction. Banzan’s favored explanation attrib uted the corruption in human nature to the cyclical deterioration or “blockage “of their constituent cosmic material force (2: 290–291). This, in turn, stimu lated population increase and competition for resources, as a result of which “material desire sprouted little by little.” With that, objective teachings and institutions together with hierarchically based institutions to control society became “unavoidable” (4: 263) and were implemented by the Sages of high Chinese antiquity. This decline in material force also had psychosomatic conse quences: variation in the quality of material force produced inequalities in moral and intellectual attainment and in sociopolitical status. “Those whose material force is pure” emerged as superior men; qualified for positions of authority. Those whose “material force” was “turbid” were commoners (4: 326), governed by ideally parental and humane rulers. However, they retained a moral con science (2: 291) and were amenable to moral regeneration uncomprehendingly through “transformation by the virtue [of their superiors]” (4: 113).

Occupying the middle band within this hierarchy were “gentlemen” whose occupation was mobile: upwardly, they became teachers to the Son of Heaven, feudal princes, lords, or ministers; downwardly, they became commoners, “peasants, artisans and merchants” (4: 326). In China itself, the status of gen tlemen was not fixed. In Japan, by contrast, gentlemen (of whom Banzan was one) were genealogically and socially set apart. In contrast to peasants and commoners who were indigenous in origin, the “gentlemen” strata of Japan were said to be descended from Tai Bo, the illustrious Zhou Dynasty emigrant founder of the Japanese imperial dynasty whom Banzan identified with Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess (6: Teisei ichiran, 2–5). In Banzan’s world, their descendants formed the politically dominant warrior estate (1: 196).

James McMullen 17

In Banzan’s worldview, distinctions in status were a contingency of history and, in China and to some extent even in Japan, were, ideally, mutable; all human beings remained fundamentally equal as all of humankind was “the progeny of Heaven and Earth” (2: 65). It followed that all were capable of moral perfectibil ity by purifying their endowment of material force (kishitsu henka; 1: 184–185) to recover and conform with their Heavenly natures. Banzan reaffirmed that “with regard to the real substance by which people are people, there is nothing [in any man] different from a Sage” (1: 350). The “true meaning” of the psychological techniques that constituted self-cultivation was open to all in China and Japan (1: 341; cf. also 1: 192). The potential for regeneration, as Banzan explained in his Genji commentary, extended to women, though they achieved moral perfection differently from men. “The wife of King Wen was a Sage woman, but she never put on moralizing airs and there was nothing clever about her” (2: 442).

The end state of the individual’s Neo-Confucian self-cultivation merged teleologically with Banzan’s vision of Japan’s socio-political and ecological regeneration. His ontology drew on the philosophical idealism of Mencius, who posited that all things were contained within the individual’s mind (Legge 1960, vol. 2, 450). For Banzan, recovery of the Neo-Confucian moral nature restored ontological unity with the natural world; it created an empathy with the cosmic ground likened to absence of numbness (1: 327). “When one is illu mined, Heavenly principle flows forth and the humaneness of [being] one body with all things is manifest” (1: 94). The individual was qualified to “assist the creative transformations of Heaven and earth” (3: 136–137).

Soteriological union with the cosmos had a signally beneficial moral but also economic and concomitantly ecological benefit. “Because [the individual] is of one substance with the myriad creatures, he is without desire” (1: 240–241). Banzan adverted frequently on desire and the morality of wealth. Wealth itself should be redefined from “small wealth,” the envy-inspiring private possession of shogun or daimyo, to the public wealth of the “Great Way” shared by all, but historically unachieved in Japan since the age of the warrior houses (3: 239). Here, again, was Daoist influence. Cosmic wealth was limited. “If everyone in the world without exception were to be rich, Heaven and Earth must then and there be exhausted” (1: 66). Like the fifth century BCE Daoist Liezi, Banzan advocated a Daoist denial of private ownership of wealth: “Gold, silver, rice and grain are produced from Heaven for the people of the realm, so they should not be the private possession of an individual” (2: 160; Graham 1991, 30–31). He had a consciously Daoist yearn ing for frugality and tranquility. Work should be performed “with a heart at ease” (kokoro yuruyuru to shite; 2: 317) “The basis of frugality is being without desire. When those in superior positions are without desire, there is little business” (1: 242). Absence of possessions allowed “gentlemen… [to] strive at scholarship and the arts and achieve talent and virtue” (1: 67). The people in the society of high Chinese antiquity knew paucity “but suffered no deficiencies” (1: 68). Confucius

18 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

himself had claimed that true joy could be found in “extreme poverty” (4: 78–79). Banzan’s ideal, as he found in the Genji, was for cultural richness coupled with material frugality.

Banzan deserves the last word on his holistic “restoration of Japan” based on the harmony between humankind and the environment. Two passages offer glimpses of his physiocratic vision. The first describes the subjective rewards of recapturing the “great age of Yao and Shun [the legendary sage-rulers of antiquity in China] for which, thousands of years later, even in the distant lands of Korea and Japan, no one does not yearn” (4: 458).

[The student of Confucianism] born into a peasant family and possessing land, or, for some reason concealing himself as a farmer, throws himself into the work of thecultivator. In his heart, he thinks the thoughts proper to the people of Yao and Shun. He “roams free and easy” as he irrigates his paddy, mows in his dry fields, puts his hands and feet into the soil, and even as he stands leaning on the handle of his hoe, his joy in his purity of heart and ease above the myriad creatures, is unashamed before Heaven, Earth, and the Spirit Intelligences, still less before men. (2: 52)

The second passage evokes a cultured arcadia. Here, disciplined cultural and ritual practices that Banzan had identified in the Tale of Genji complement and enhance the natural environment,

The disciples of the Confucian school in their leisure from ploughing, planting, and gathering firewood, learned civil arts, practiced military skills, amused themselves with lute and zither. They performed their family occupations and mutually performed rites, music, archery, and horsemanship. They made preparations foragricultural work in advance of the seasons without negligence but were not fussed. Nor were they carried away by the amusements of the six arts. This was the residual style of the age of the Sages. (3: 40)

A Confucian messiah

Who did Banzan think would implement his ambitious “new normal” of an ancient, de-urbanized arcadia? In the immediate future, much would depend on how the threats of pressing social issues, financial debt and invasion were solved. Beyond that, like Mencius (Legge 1960, 2: 422, 423), Banzan looked to a Confucian messiah, a “superior man of the future” or “enlightened king” (2: 422–423) to restore the losses of time and to regenerate Japan. The current cycle of universal decline had only reached the “epoch of the horse” (uma no kai) that still allowed for recovery. “Heaven and Earth are not yet due to be destroyed. The Way will certainly arise, though Heaven and Earth will surely be darkened for a while.” (2: 26). He expressed a Confucian optimism that if “an enlightened king who would adapt to the times and could work a restoration were to come forth,” “the material force of Heaven and Earth would be clear and bright. Thus, there would be a return to the material force of the spring cycle, gradually fewer people would be born, and good people would come forth” (2:

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291).Neither Banzan’s fears nor his optimism, however, persuaded the Tokugawa authorities. In 1687 his memorial came to their attention. He was sentenced to domiciliary confinement in Koga castle near Edo for “inappropriate” conduct. He died there 4 years later.

Epilogue

Banzan’s proposals were hardly heeded during his lifetime. True, his response to the penetration of mercantile capital set an atavistic tone for much Tokugawa thinking on economic subjects. But his discrete practical proposals, such as the de-urbanization of Edo and castle towns, were too radical to be practicable. While in office in Okayama, Banzan had tried, on a small scale and with at best short-term success, to settle samurai on the land; only much later in the last decades of the Tokugawa regime was that policy even partially implemented. Some reform of institutional aspects of Shinto and Buddhism was carried out by Ikeda Mitsumasa, though significantly more coercively than Banzan himself con doned (McMullen 1999, 98, 133–136). A little later, reform of the sankin k otai, is said to have found favor “for a while” with the eighth shogun Yoshimune [r. 1716–1745] (Tsukahira 1966, 113). But several decades after his death, the Confucian scholar Hattori Nankaku (1683–1756) remarked that implementa tion of Banzan’s thinking on economic matters would require “an alteration in the Decree” or change of regime (Yuasa 1927, 653).

Within the fractious world of Japanese Confucian schools, Banzan was more often perceived as a Confucian activist rather than a scholar. Prejudice survived the Restoration. In the post-Restoration surge of nationalism, his Sinocentric world view conflicted with the intensifying ideology of Japanese exceptionalism. In twentieth-century Japan, the quest for modernity that preoccupied the Japanese intellectual and sociopolitical world was reflected in an ambivalent atti tude to nature; it tended to polarization between nature and man, and ideologically attempts to privilege one or the other. Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) was at the forefront of a wide project to rewrite Japanese intellectual history as the quest for ontological independence from nature. To him, Banzan represented a residually medieval world view in which man and nature inhabited a continuum that ultimately legitimated an illiberal premodern status quo. He concluded that Banzan’s “clich e-ridden moralism” barely merited analysis in his seminal work on Tokugawa thought (Masao 1974, fnte. 45, 42–43).

This sketch of Banzan’s Confucian beliefs shows his diagnosis of the con temporary ecological crisis and proposals for the regeneration of his world to be remarkable for their scope, depth, and passion. They are based on a univer salist view of history, objective critiques of contemporary Japanese institutions, and a metaphysically grounded method of personal moral regeneration. They also shared Confucian optimism. Banzan stressed that humans were all20 Twenty-first-century ecology lessons from seventeenth-century Japan

creatures of Heaven. Human nature refracted the order of the cosmos and mutually interacted with its operation, predisposing humanity morally to con form with its beneficence. In this order, humankind played a privileged albeit ancillary moral role under beneficent Heaven, charged with “assisting the cre ative processes of Heaven and Earth.” Particularly, intelligent “humaneness,” a virtue associated with spring and the creativity of nature, must inform all ruler ship. But humanity’s role was double edged. Human agency was also capable of damaging those processes. Banzan found that his contemporaries’ exercise of political authority dangerously ignored the true nature of the world as a moral-natural continuum. He viewed their rulership as inhumane, egocentric, repressive, and autocratic. They promoted greedy and ignorant predation of the natural environment, especially its forestry resources. Their transgressions threatened imminent catastrophic disorder and climatic irregularities through the admonitory or punitive intervention of Heaven.

Our modern world confronts ecological challenges even more daunting than Banzan’s. Julia Adeney Thomas calls for research into historical “cultural and political resources … to meet the challenge of climate collapse” (Thomas 2013, 296). Mutatis mutandis Banzan’s insistence that ecology is not epiphe nomenal but philosophically, morally, and empirically a central concern to humanity meets this challenge. Seventeenth-century Japan paid negligible attention to his warnings of impending catastrophe. The question is: do we?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. References to Banzan’s views are to Kumazawa (Banzan 1978) by volume and page number. 2. A current ratio of two-fifths to the peasantry, three fifths to the magistrate is cited as “the present system” in Banzan’s writings (2: 96).

2. The five norms (goten) are as follows: “benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and good faith.” His “ten moral values” (jugi ) pertained to the linkage between familial relationships and social relations: between father and son/kindness; son and father/filial piety; ruler and minister/benevolence; minister and ruler/loyalty; husband and wife/righteousness; wife and husband/obedience; elder and younger brother/ goodness; younger and elder brother/fraternal respect; between friends/ reciprocally friendliness and good faith.

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विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)

James McMullen received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1969. After teaching at the Universities of Toronto and Oxford, he has retired. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke and St Antony’s Colleges at Oxford and Fellow of the British Academy. His research has been in premodern Japanese intellectual history and particularly Confucianism in Japan.